How Right-Wing Insanity Became the "Sensible Center"

If you want to know how we got to the verge of a banana republic economy, read Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics. It reads like a suspense caper, which is appropriate for describing the biggest con job in history.

If you insist on a shorter version, here's Peter Daou:

At the root of the problem is this: the GOP benefits from a superior communications mechanism with which to shape and reshape conventional wisdom. Faced with a public that holds opposing views, politicians can either change their positions to match the public’s views or change the public’s views to match their positions — Republicans almost always choose the latter, bolstered by a highly sophisticated framing and messaging infrastructure crafted and funded over decades.

Climate change gaining traction? No problem, put oil money to use, fund bogus studies, cram misinformation down Americans’ throats using talk radio, Fox, etc., employ the Overton Window to move the dialogue to the radical right, undercut science, attack academics, question reality, and eventually move the needle in their direction. It’s an unseemly process, but it works. Suddenly, magically, global warming is a hoax. People without the slightest scientific grounding make dogmatic pronouncements about it, disdainfully dismissing a mortal threat to their own children and grandchildren.

On the other side you have the Democratic establishment, political leaders, pollsters and strategists who, by and large, are poll addicts, chronically incapable of taking principled stands, obsessed with appealing to independent voters, hostile to progressive advocates, often just as captive to moneyed interests as their Republican counterparts. Mind-bogglingly, it was the White House and Democratic leadership that worked with BP to ‘disappear’ the Gulf spill, for fear it would harm them in the 2010 midterms. Craven doesn’t begin to describe it.

The fact that America is a low-information nation only makes the right’s task of creating conventional wisdom easier. There’s so much hype about the Tea Party that it’s easy to forget who they are: Foxified and Limbaughed citizens whose legitimate anxiety has been manipulated by a billionaire-funded misinformation machine:

SNIP

My fundamental disagreement with Drum is where to place the blame. From my perspective, it falls squarely with the Democratic establishment, not the broad liberal community.

Here’s why. Imagine a scenario where Democrats, instead of marginalizing the netroots, treated them with the same awe and respect the Tea Party engenders on the GOP side. Imagine an Obama presidency where the health care debate started with a fierce fight for single-payer; where Gitmo had been closed; where gay rights were unequivocally supported; where Bush and Cheney were investigated for sanctioning torture; where climate change was a top priority; where Bush’s civil liberties violations were prosecuted rather than reinforced; where the Bush tax cuts expired; where the stimulus was much bigger; where programs for the poor, for research, jobs, infrastructure, science, education, were enhanced at the expense of war and profits for the wealthy; where the Republican assault on women’s rights was met with furious resistance. I could go on and on.

In short, imagine an America where the Democratic establishment loudly proclaimed that they were unshakable champions of core progressive values and that they would work hand in hand with their base to convince America that their ideas were superior to the right’s.

Of course, that’s a fantasy. The unwillingness of Democratic leaders and strategists to do anything remotely close to that has virtually guaranteed that the triangle isn’t formed on the left. Obama’s supporters are fond of pointing to the GOP House and complaining that his hands are tied because of the 2010 midterms. But it’s precisely the Democratic establishment’s decrepitude that enabled the rise of the Tea Party and the 2010 defeat.

Greg Sargent frets that “one sixth of Americans agree with the liberal argument about the [debt] deal.” He’s right to be worried about the numbers. America’s national debate is conducted on the right’s terms. That won’t change unless and until Democrats work with their most ardent activists to move a low-information nation toward progressive positions. The online community and progressive groups simply can’t do it on their own without the participation of the Democratic leadership and media. The media won’t do it as long as the Democratic establishment marginalizes the left.

As I said previously, faced with a public that holds opposing views, politicians can either change their positions to match the public’s views or change the public’s views to match their positions. Only when Democrats decide to do the latter will America’s rightward shift be halted or reversed.

If the White House and Democratic leadership were in sync with the activist left rather than insulting them at every opportunity, the media would follow and the triangle would form. Look at Obama and Bush’s big swings in approval – the American public is far more malleable than Democrats acknowledge. In a nation where anxiety abounds, strong, principled, powerful, determined voices will change minds. Republicans know that and they have a system to take advantage of it.

Troublingly, neither Obama nor Democratic leaders and senior strategists have any intention of doing the same. I’ll leave it to others to figure out why. Suffice it to say that many progressive thought leaders believe it’s because the Democratic establishment has little in common with progressivism.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the inexorable march of human progress is the activist left’s secret weapon, ultimately trumping manufactured conventional wisdom, the deceptions of the right and the weakness of the Democratic establishment. It’s a harrowing journey, but eventually progress wins out.

UPDATE: A reader points out something I alluded to but should have noted more forcefully. Namely, that the public is often more aligned with the progressive view on many issues, but is still force-fed the right’s positions.

Liberals know we cannot expect anything but betrayal from the current Democratic leadership. We have to rebuild Liberal America from the ground up, one American Liberal (whether she knows it or not) at a time.